In the previous post, we discussed in broad terms some recent news concerning Creative Commons licensing (including WhiteHouse.gov adopting a Creative Commons license) and went into specifics on how Creative Commons licenses work, along with the different variations.
In this post, we’ll deal with the news more directly as well as talk about how AboutUs uses and views it’s free licensing as it applies to the wiki value of AssumeGoodFaith.
WhiteHouse.gov goes under free license
As mentioned by numerous weblogs, including the Creative Commons weblog and NowPublic.com, the Obama administration kicked off his presidency by putting up the new WhiteHouse.gov website in the first minutes of Obama’s presidency. Included as part of the (re)launch was support for a broad Creative Commons license:
Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Now, by federal law, government-produced materials on the website are not copy-protected, but the new administration took the extraordinary step of ensuring public consumption and sharing of all materials on the website. As noted by the Creative Commons weblog, very few others countries share this policy and “Obama’s far sighted choice should serve as an example for other governments around the world: now is the time to start sharing.”
As wiki and open culture enthusiasts, we couldn’t have said it better.
Wikipedia switching to Creative Commons?
As noted in ArsTechnica a few months ago, a change to the Gnu Free Document License (GFDL) allows a limited window for wikis currently licensed under GFDL (like Wikipedia and related WikiMedia projects) to migrate to the Creative Commons Share Alike license (CC-BY-SA).
The root reason for this is that Creative Commons licensing did not exists when Wikipedia was founded, so it’s founders used the best “Copyleft” licensing available at the time, GFDL which really was intended for use licensing software manuals. Meanwhile, other wikis, in order to be Wikipedia compliant have had to license under GFDL as well. Over the years, the limits of the GFDL license became apparent for a wiki and articles edited by hundreds of thousands of editors, so the change was suggested to accommodate a shift.
While it appears that the change came at the behest of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, in true wiki fashion the entire Wikipedia/Wikimedia community will vote (simple majority) on whether the encyclopedia will make the switch. Voting is intended to begin mid-February and last for 2-4 weeks.
For more info on the licensing and the shift, see Wikimedia’s Licensing Update page.
An AssumeGoodFaith License
AboutUs is licensed under a combination of GFDL and the Creative Commons BA-SA license. Content on AboutUs is freely available for reuse in your own creative endeavors (even commercial purposes). The only thing we ask is that When you copy, distribute and/or transmit content from AboutUs you must do the following:
1. Let others know where you got the content from (a link to http://www.AboutUs.org is fine for this purpose),
2. License any modifications you make to the content under a license that preserves the same freedoms (e.g., GFDL 1.2 or CC By-SA).
That said, we believe devoutly in the wiki value of AssumeGoodFaith which means we act upon the assumption that everyone who edits our website or uses our content for creative/commercial use is doing so with a spirit of sharing, giving and collaboration to grow the universal commons. By assuming good faith in the face of evidence to the contrary, we assume that those who use our content will properly honor and credit AboutUs, our editors and community for the work they’ve done. Beyond that, we assume you’ll do great things with our content, so go for it and have fun!
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